The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman Mailer in the Light of Russian Literature: Difference between revisions

Although Mailer was a master at mixing history with fiction and fiction with history, he also wrote a number of important works, such as ''Oswald’s Tale'', which, aside from certain displays of artistic intuition and imagination, do not contain any fictional elements at all. Nevertheless, there is one moment in ''Oswald’s Tale'' when the story of Oswald as narrated by Mailer bears a striking, I would say even astounding resemblance, to a passage in Dostoevsky’s ''Crime''. It should be noted here briefly that Dostoevsky, who was an avid follower of the contemporary scene in the newspapers, himself wrote a novel, ''The Devils'', also translated as ''The Possessed'', but literally ''The Demons'' from the Russian title, ''Besy'', which is based on a real event, the so-called Nechaev Affair. A certain Nechaev murdered a man in order to create a bond

In ''Oswald’s Tale'', Mailer develops the idea that Oswald thought that fate had put him at work in a place where President John Kennedy’s motorcade would pass by and he could not resist believing that he must take advantage of this coincidence. To substantiate this notion, Mailer quotes Priscilla Johnson McMillan in her book ''Marina and Lee'': “the uncanny selection of a route that would carry the President right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate had singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task which has been his destiny all along and which would cause him to go down in history.”{{sfn|McMillan|1977|p=781}}

We know from her testimony to the Warren Commission that Oswald’s mother was obsessed with her place and the place of her son in history. In the epigraph to ''Oswald’s Tale'', when Representative Boggs asks her to brief, she says that she cannot be brief, because, “This is my life and my son’s life going down in history." What is more, in later years she understood her son’s actions only in this light. My reading of Marguerite Oswald is that ultimately she is justifying her son’s murder of President Kennedy because it guaranteed his place in history, and thereby her own. Furthermore, she seems to have passed this obsession with one’s place in history to her son, together with a puerile rebellion against authority.

In Book 1 of ''Crime'', during the time when Raskolnikov is alternating between his determination to kill Alena, the pawnbroker, who is a repulsive, greasy-haired usurer, and his doubts and compunctions about committing such a bloody, brutal act, as he happens to overhear two conversations involving her. In the first conversation, he overhears two people inviting Lizaveta, Alena’s step sister to visit them at seven o’clock in the evening the next day. The second is a conversation in a tavern in which a student tells an officer how rich the pawnbroker is and what a hideous and despicable person she is. The student suggests that it would be a good idea if one were to “kill her and take her money, in order with its help to devote oneself to the service of all mankind and the common cause.”{{sfn|Dostoevsky|1991|p=80}} To the officer’s objection that there is nature to deal with, the student replies that without correcting and directing nature “there would never have been a single ''great man''{{sfn|Dostoevsky|1991|p=81}} (emphasis added). Raskolnikov is greatly agitated by the coincidence of overhearing this conversation in which exactly the thoughts he had been having about the pawnbroker were expressed by the student, and it had “an extremely strong influence on him during the subsequent development of the affair: as though here some form of predestination, of augury had been at work.”{{sfn|Dostoevsky|1991|p=81}}

This is not the only uncanny link between ''Oswald’s Tale'' and Dostoevsky’s ''Crime'', for in both works there is a second, follow-on murder committed by Raskolnikov and Oswald, and here again the motivation for both of them is nearly identical. In each case, the second murder signals the failure of the initial, ideologically motivated and carefully planned murder.  Just as Raskol’nikov kills Alena, the pawnbroker’s unfortunate sister Lizaveta goes into panic when the latter surprises him just after he has murdered her sister, comparable to Oswald being surprised by the equally unlucky Officer T. J. Tippit, whom Oswald kills in his own panic. The great Russian short story writer, Isaak Babel, wrote once that “a well-devised story needn’t try to be like real life. Real life is only too eager to resemble a well-devised story.”{{sfn|Babel|1993|p=226}} and so did it turn out in the case of Oswald, President Kennedy, and Officer Tippit.

With respect to Raskolnikov, we can only deduce that his panic-stricken action gives the lie to his well-rehearsed murder, which as in the case of Oswald as well, has at its base a false noble goal of improving the lot of mankind. Mailer, who is writing a work of documentary history while simultaneously exploiting the privileges of the author as super sleuth, spells this out explicitly in the case of Oswald:

{{quote|As soon as he killed Tippit, the mighty architecture of his [Oswald’s] ideology ... came tumbling down. He knew Americans well enough to recognize that some might listen to his ideas if he killed a President, but nearly all would be repelled by any gunman who would mow down a cop, a family man—that act was small enough to void interest in every large idea he wished to introduce.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=783}} }}

One more thing ought to be noted: for all of the differences in character between Oswald and the fictional Raskolnikov, they were both megalomaniacs. Oswald, the no-account nonentity, an odd combination of braggart and loner, and Raskolnikov, the poverty-stricken university dropout, imagined themselves to be individuals much greater than they were. And each of them used murder in an unsuccessful attempt to “step across” into the realm of the great, the extraordinary.

''Harlot's Ghost'' is, after ''Oswald's Tale'', arguably the most thoroughly "Russian" work, fictional or documentary, that Mailer has written-provided we stipulate it is Russian in a thoroughly Soviet guise. Except for a cameo appearance of the Russian poet Evgeny Evtushenko, a character with the nickname of Gogol (Hyman Bosqueverde), and a suggestion by the narrator, Harry Hubbard, that he might become the first to create “American ''samizdat'',”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=35}} the novel does not have an open, direct relationship to Russian literature, as do ''An American Dream'' and ''The Castle in the Forest''. Rather, Russian literature reveals in ''Ghost'' more on character types and their development.   

The most obvious way in which ''Ghost'' puts us in mind of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is by its sheer ''massivnost’'', that is massiveness, consisting as it does of 1,310 pages, including bibliography and notes, in the 1991 Random House cloth edition. In this regard, Mailer probably outdoes all Russian writers among whom his few rivals in this regard include Tolstoy in ''War and Peace'' and the eighteenth-century Russian author, Mikhail Chulkov, who wrote a satirical novel called ''Peresmeshnik'' (The Mockathon) that is so long that it is difficult to find anyone, even among specialists, who have read it through to the end. And we must not forget Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (author of the multi-volume ''Red Wheel'' series), with whom Mailer shares a consuming interest in history.  

''Harlot’s Ghost'' consists of a number of different genres that include the following: an historical novel, a novel of psychological realism, a ''Bildungsroman'', a confession, a spy novel, a mystery novel, an epistolary novel, a family chronicle, a gothic tale with a nod in the direction of magic realism, a love story, and a brief but powerful lyrical sketch. In addition, moral, philosophical, political, and religious elements found in the novel may at any given moment verge into tracts on these subjects. The major novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are characterized by just this sort of grab bag of genres. If Tolstoy tends to favor the psychologically realistic historical novel and the family chronicle with a large dose of morality and philosophy, Dostoevsky employs psychological realism with dashes of the fantastic or gothic and the

With respect to the overall narrative structure of ''Ghost'', we may also perceive some similarities with Tolstoy’s technique of switching back and forth between different groups of characters over the course of his novels, including not only ''War and Peace'' and ''Anna Karenina'', but also in a much shorter one, ''Hadji Murat'', 1905, about an eponymous Chechen prince. In ''Ghost'', Mailer has added some antiquarian spice to his more modern amalgam of fiction and document with his implementation of an epistolary technique in

narrators. Mailer, after all, throughout his career deliberately thrust himself onto the public stage and was more than outspoken issues and events. I would urge circumspection, however, with respect to Harry Hubbard as a reliable source for Mailer’s opinions about the true state of the United States. There is certainly some of Mailer in Hubbard, but how much is difficult to say. Hubbard, who is primarily of Yankee stock, remarks that from his mother’s side he is one-eighth Jewish, “just enough never to know what to do about it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=76}} In this respect, he resembles Steven Richard Rojack in ''An American Dream'', who is some unspecified combination of Polish, English, and Irish. Mailer’s use of narrators, such as Rojack and Hubbard, with different ethnic strains in their background, is a clever way of simultaneously suggesting possible connections between himself and his narrators and also creating distance from them. It is also an effective means of underscoring their complex and often unresolved identities. If we need another biographical basis for Mailer’s gift for mimicry and mimesis in his creation of fictive narrators, we might cite his own multiple identities as a Brooklynite, a New Englander, and a New Yorker. Readers of ''Ghost'' might well swear he was also a Mainer.

Aside from his relationship to the author, there are important questions about Harry Hubbard’s reliability as a narrator that should be addressed. On both the visual and phonetic levels, the ever so Yankee name, Herrick Hubbard, looks and sounds suspiciously close to the name of Humbert Humbert, the firstperson narrator of ''Lolita'', a novel by that most Russian and most American writer, Vladimir Nabokov (stress on the second syllables). Not only are Herrick/Harry Hubbard’s initials obviously identical to those of Humbert Humbert, but the surname Hubbard shares with the name Humbert four phonemes in the same order (h, u, b, r) and one allophone (d/t). Furthermore, m and b are both labial consonants, and unstressed a and unstressed e are identical schwa vowel sounds when spoken aloud. (Surnames ending in -ard or -ert are characteristically of Norman French origin.)

Early in ''Ghost'', Harry Hubbard introduces us to his talent for dissembling and duplicity. This pattern is evident in his starting out to write a magnum opus he calls ''The Imagination of the State'' about the KGB and then switches to a memoir of his life in the CIA. Subsequently, in an act of cunning that is rich in multiple ironies, Hubbard uses his first project as cover for the second and real one, which was just as illegal in the US as would have been a memoir on the KGB written by a Soviet spy in the USSR.

he conducts with his mistress Chloe, while at the same time professing undying love for his wife Kittredge. I should add here that Harry Hubbard is the first to acknowledge his doubts and weaknesses and that he is not without guilt, as shown when he speaks of his need to “cleanse my soul of Chloe”{{Sfn}Mailer|1991|p=39}} before seeing Kittredge.

It seems reasonable to assert that a novel which begins with the word Omega will sooner or later introduce Alpha, and so it is with ''Ghost''. The duality inherent in this pairing is pervasive in ''Ghost'' on a number of levels and is especially striking in Mailer’s portrayal of individual characters and, indeed, of human nature in general. The portrait of human duality found in ''Ghost'' is remarkably broad, inclusive, and virtually comprehensive as it ranges from the basic Alpha-Omega construct to transsexuality, touching on all manner of possibilities in between. Moreover, virtually all of the characters, from the central to the peripheral, in this doubly spooky book are shown as double, sometimes multiple personalities. Before moving to a more specific treatment of the double characters in ''Ghost'', I believe that it is important here briefly to note the seminal role Russian fiction has played in the development of this character type in modern fiction.

The fictional representation of the dual or double personality embodied in the ''Doppelgänger'' of the German romantics, such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, became one of the salient features in the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky. Gogol’s stories, such as “The Diary of a Madman” and “The Nose” (1836), play provocative but ambiguous variations on the dual personality. They serve as the immediate inspiration for Dostoevsky’s early stories, including most graphically “The Double” (1844). In this story, an aggressive, self-confident Golyadkin Jr. torments his timid and unsure other half, Golyadkin Sr. The nameless (anti) hero in “Notes from Underground” (1864) is Golyadkin’s more intellectual direct descendant, who oscillates between Schilleresque dreams of the sublime and acts of unspeakable nastiness. Subsequently in Dostoevsky, as we have seen with regard to Raskolnikov, all of his major characters are profoundly divided within themselves. Numerous variations on this character type, including notably Stevenson’s "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and Camus’s “The Stranger” comprise an important mini-line in modern fiction.  

Mailer’s contribution to this tradition is his portrayal of the characters in ''Ghost'' either as actual or potential double agents. Those characters who are not spies, such as Jack Kennedy, the mobster Sam Giancana, and their lover Modene Murphy, with whom Hubbard also sleeps while trying to glean information on Kennedy, are not double agents but rather double dealers in their personal lives, if not in their professional lives as well.  Murphy openly declares her need always to have two different lovers at any given time, and her part-time paramour, Kennedy, acts in the same manner. Moreover, nearly all of Mailer’s characters in ''Ghost'' are double agents/characters within themselves. For example, Radcliffe graduate Kittredge, the seemingly controlled, supremely rational, scholarly proponent of her own version of the Alpha-Omega theory of human personality, speaks with a ghost and becomes the passionate lover of first Harlot, then Hubbard, and finally Dix Butler. She is also an exemplary and doting mother to her son Christopher. For his part, Harry Hubbard’s duality of personality breaks down along at least a couple of lines, including especially the struggle within him between timidity and the urge to perform deeds of machismo. Like virtually all of the other characters in ''Ghost'', Herrick Hubbard has at least one code name, two nicknames, Harry and Rick, and a false name Harlot gives him for his false passport, William Madden Libby. Although code names are the norm for spies, they too reflect the dual and sometimes duplicitous nature of the practitioners of this ancient profession.  

Another seminal theme in Russian literature that is signaled by the title of Ivan Turgenev’s novel ''Fathers and Children'' (1861), usually translated as ''Fathers and Sons'', and is reflected in ''Ghost'', but only after it has been refracted through Dostoevsky’s novels ''The Devils'' and ''The Brothers Karamazov''. The intense but fundamentally restrained and ultimately unresolved generational struggle of Turgenev’s novel is transformed in ''The Devils'' into a battle royal with apocalyptic implications. In ''Karamazovs'', the father Fedor has spawned a brood that includes the innocent believer Alyosha, the resolute rationalist Ivan, the sensualist Dmitry, and an utterly corrupted bastard son Smerdiakov, who murders Fedor.

Mailer creates in ''Ghost'' a collective portrait of the American spy that has affinities with Dostoevsky’s representation of the ''Karamazovs'', as well as with his treatment of the conspirators in ''The Devils''. The domineering father figure of Harlot plays a role that, broadly speaking, is not so different from the

one father Fedor plays in ''Brothers'', for Harlot is the progenitor of a whole generation of spies, each of whom represents a different approach to the profession, and of course to life itself. Not everyone in ''Ghost'' is a ''protégé'' of Harlot, since some of the others in his generation of the fathers are suspicious and/or envious and/or frightened of Harlot. Mailer’s multi-faceted depiction of the American spy contains true believers in the Company (CIA), such as E. Howard Hunt and the elder Hubbard, and also perhaps Rosen, at one end of the spectrum, and opportunists for whom espionage is nothing more than a means of acquiring wealth or power at the other end of the spectrum. Dix Butler is the ultimate opportunist among these characters, someone with fearsome talents in all of the darker, violent arts of espionage, someone who uses them ruthlessly but for no defined purpose. Butler is the enigmatic, explosive, risk-taking side of Harlot drawn out to its logical extreme. He is the Smerdiakov of ''Ghost'' and is totally corrupt and completely without scruples; he is not so much a professional agent of espionage as a bastard agent, a rogue spy who, as he does in his assault on the Close, uses the skills he acquired in the Agency for murderous purposes. At the end of ''Ghost'', we do not know if Butler has killed Harlot, his spiritual father, but this scenario is a possibility that Harry Hubbard contemplates. (Kittredge’s conversation with what is presumably Harlot’s ghost would tend to support this interpretation—at least for believers in ghosts.) Smerdiakov is driven to kill his father, Fedor, largely because he resents his father’s harsh treatment of him. We know less about Butler’s motives, but we cannot exclude resentment of and rivalry with Harlot. Ultimately though, we do not know what it is that drives him.

If translation of the title of ''The Devils'' had been done more carefully in the first place, perhaps scholars who refer to it in English would not be constantly forced to note that the novel has also been translated as ''The Possessed'', but that the most accurate version of the Russian title, ''Besy'', would be ''The Demons''. In this novel (which I believe is equal to anything Dostoevsky wrote), Peter Verkhovensky assembles a motley crew of sycophants to kill a man with the ostensible purpose of using the murder to galvanize them into something like a revolutionary cell. At the commission of the murder, which was clearly based on the Nechaev affair mentioned above, this rabble disintegrates into a pathetic pack of whiners and squealers, signaling the utter failure of the whole venture.

It would, of course, be a gross distortion to characterize Mailer’s depiction of the fiasco of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion in these terms. One has to wonder, though, about the conduct of some of the CIA’s agents in their Cold War operations in Washington, Berlin, Uruguay, and Cuba, for among them were soulless ideologues, cynical opportunists, some of them with nothing less than demonic zeal and others with clearly criminal proclivities, engaged in all manner of violations of legal and ethical norms, up to and including murder and attempted murder, in the name of the Company, and for some, in the name of the cause. In so doing, they naturally used the justification that the enemy had to be met on its own unprincipled, ruthless, and brutal terms.

These positions are not, however, the judgments of Harry Hubbard, even though this is what he describes in his narration. Hubbard, who disdains the careerists, is himself not an opportunist and also not a complete true believer, vacillating between fearing and revering Harlot, his unconventional, unpredictable mentor and protector, his spiritual father. Hubbard is often aware of the excesses committed by Harlot, Dix Butler, Bill Harvey, and others, but he seems willing to accept them as a necessary part of doing business in the Company. In his descriptions of the CIA’s extended campaign to overthrow Fidel Castro, Hubbard is not concerned with the wisdom of the policy, but rather with demonstrating his own machismo by taking part in the Bay of Pigs invasion and other incursions onto Cuban territory. In a fit of rage at losing double agent Chevi Fuertes, he “consecrates” himself to the assassination of Fidel Castro.{{Sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1229}} Years later, Harry Hubbard maintains an attitude of detachment toward his involvement in the campaign against Castro and does not seem to question any aspect of it. Hubbard’s faith in the Company and in the country it is meant to serve remains fundamentally unshaken until he comes to think that Harlot may have gone over to the Soviet side. The possibility of such a betrayal by Harlot forces Hubbard to reevaluate everything he thought he knew and believed about his spiritual father, and in a real sense, everything he thought he understood about life.

David Anshen argues persuasively that ''Ghost'' contains a great hoax, that is, a hoax on the genre of the novel itself.{{sfn|Anshen|2008|pp=466–470}} That is certainly an intriguing possibility. Another possibility is that ''Ghost'' is Mailer’s contribution to the genre of the unfinished novel. As we know, novels may be unfinished for a variety of reasons. The Russian writer Mikhail {{harvtxt|Bulgakov|1996}} worked on ''The Master and Margarita'', [''Master i Margarita''] from the late 1920s throughout the 1930s, and was still making changes literally on his deathbed but was unable to finish the novel before he died in 1939. The German writer Robert {{harvtxt|Musil|1995}} wrote a novel, ''The Man Without Qualities'' [''Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften''] over twenty years but was also unable to finish it, as he continued to append to it a long series of variations on ''possible'' endings. In the case of ''Ghost'', as Anshen points out, Norman Mailer gave two different explanations for not finishing the novel. The first, as Anshen writes, was that Mailer believed that “technology has dehumanized espionage.”{{sfn|Anshen|2008|p=468}} A more interesting explanation Anshen cites may be found in a BBC interview quoted by Michael Glenday in which Mailer said, “the reader having been given the end and the beginning will conceive of ‘that middle{{' "}}; then Mailer adds that if he does complete the novel, readers will have a chance to “check their version against mine.”{{sfn|Glenday|1995|p=135}}

I wonder, too, whether there might be a more mundane reason. Perhaps the usually indefatigable Mailer may have said all that he had to say about the characters, and even more so about the events they were involved in. ''Ghost'' was published in 1991, the same year the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a state. That momentous event had the effect, willy-nilly, of changing our perspectives on the Soviet Union and its history.  It also made possible Mailer’s visit to Russia during which he conducted extensive interviews with people who had known Lee Harvey Oswald. I would further contend that on a certain level ''Oswald’s Tale'' is the sequel to ''Harlot’s Ghost'', at least with respect to Mailer’s detailed portrait of the Soviet Union of the early 1960s. Whether it is or it is not, the tale of Oswald may have quenched Mailer’s appetite for the detritus of the old Soviet state for at least long enough for him to lose interest in ''Ghost'' as well.

In ''Ghost'', the greater philosophical and moral questions about human nature and the human condition are unresolved. That they will remain so is suggested in a letter from Kittredge to Harry Hubbard where she quotes Harlot as saying, “It is painful in the extreme to live with questions rather with answers, but that is the only honorable intellectual course.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1206}} I would add, moreover, that from the point of view of the author, beyond intellectual honesty, there is the question of artistic credibility. It is one thing to describe the often bizarre, criminal conduct of the CIA and its agents, but it is quite another thing to claim to have found the answers to life’s eternal conundra.   

As critics of Mailer we seem intent on pinning him down with respect to his attitude toward the events and characters he describes. In ''Ghost'', this may be a fruitless project, because the lens Harry Hubbard employs to see the world, except in certain places, such as the description of Desert Mountain at the beginning of the novel, is not necessarily the lens of Norman Mailer. Together with the incomplete plot, this narrative stance renders any such judgments problematic and speculative.

Having mentioned Desert Mountain, I cannot resist a brief remark about the magnificent lyrical sketch of the island with which Mailer begins the novel. Here his prose rhymes and has rhythm and alliteration, as in “I love the piercing blue of Frenchman’s Bay and Blue Hill Bay, and the bottomless blue of the Eastern and Western Way.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=4}}. And he creates a catalogue of flowers that will send all but an expert scurrying to the dictionary: “The old hayfields smell of redtop and timothy, and wildflowers bloom. The northern blue violet and the starflower, the wood sorrel and the checkerberry, painted trillium and wild geranium, golden heather and Indian pipe grow in our bogs and fields and on the sunny slopes of mountains in the seams between ledges of rock.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=5}}

If the reader of ''Ghost'' begins to flag in the middle of Harry Hubbard’s correspondence with Modene Murphy, he or she can slip back to this splendid passage of poetic prose as a quick refresher.

Mailer’s last novel with prominent ties to Russian literature is of course ''The Castle in the Forest'', which is itself in a way, perhaps at least two ways, also unfinished. Before moving to that discussion, however, I would like to examine Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son'' in relation to Mikhail Bulgakov’s portrait of Jesus/Yeshua in his novel ''The Master and Margarita'', because these two works resonate with and illuminate each other in some intriguing and important ways.]

The first chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov’s ''Master and Margarita'', which was written during the late 1920s and 1930s but only published for the first time in 1967–68, opens with a conversation about Jesus between a Soviet literary bureaucrat named Berlioz and a poet named Bezdomny, whose name translates into English as Homeless. Ivan Bezdomny has written a poem in the anti-religious spirit of the times portraying Jesus in a most negative light. Berlioz, however, claims that he has missed the point, which is that Jesus “never existed at all.”{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|p=5}} While Berlioz continues to develop a series of examples from different world religions to buttress his argument, a strange-looking man comes up to them and butts into their conversation. This man, who carries a walking stick with a black knob in the shape of a poodle, turns out to be, as we learn later in the novel, someone named Woland, who is Bulgakov’s version of a modern Mephistopheles in Moscow. (The name Woland is almost certainly derived from the demon in German folklore called Wieland, who was responsible for putting the fetters on people in Hell.)  For all of his supposed erudition, Berlioz does not recognize who Woland is, and neither does the less well-read poet Bezdomny. As a conclusion to the discussion about Jesus, Woland finally pronounces that, “no points of view are necessary. He simply existed, and that’s all there is to it.”{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|p=12}}

For his part, Mailer, from all appearances, agrees with Bulgakov’s character Woland, because Mailer has written a novel called ''The Gospel According to the Son'' (1997) from the first person point of view of Jesus himself. Since both authors affirm that this Jesus did exist, the question becomes, what sort of person, man, or god do these two authors portray him as. (I will refer to Jesus mainly by his Aramaic name, Yeshua, since this is what Mailer and Bulgakov also do for the most part in their novels.)

I should say early on that Norman Mailer was not familiar with Bulgakov’s novel when he wrote ''The Gospel According to the Son''.{{efn|Mailer told me this in a conversation we had in Tampa in 2006.}} So I am not talking here about influence. Rather, I am interested in how these two versions of the Yeshua story intersect, contradict, and mutually illuminate each other. I am also interested in how these stories shed light on what I am calling the Urtext—Your text/Our Text of the story. Here I can not promise to perform any tricks in the style of Stanley {{harvtxt|Fish|1980}}, who is proud of his ability to make texts disappear throughout his ''Is There a Text in This Class?'' On the contrary, this text/story, which has four biblical versions and several apocryphal ones, which Bulgakov was familiar with, seems to me to be pretty strong evidence of the persistence of certain texts rather than their disappearance. It seems to me that the persistence of the story of Yeshua and his friends—more on them later—is certainly an affirmation of the validity of certain branches of reader response-reading theory that maintain that the real story is one we construct, destruct, and/or reconstruct for ourselves from the Urtext—hence my little formulation Urtext → Your Text/Our Text. Finally, I would also like to speculate on what these two tales of Yeshua tell us about the ways in which modern writers constantly retell “sacred texts”; are they desacralizing them or are they resacralizing them to suit their own purposes?

Since both Mailer and Bulgakov undertake to get the story of Yeshua straight, it seems that they must believe someone before them got the story wrong. And this is indeed the case, and what is more, they do not hesitate to identify the principal culprit. In the second chapter of the ''Master and Margarita'' Bulgakov raises this very issue in an interview between Yeshua and Pontius Pilate. When Pontius Pilate asks Yeshua whether he really did advocate destroying the temple, as had been reported, here is what Yeshua says: “These good people haven’t learned anything and they have mixed up everything that I have said. In general I’m beginning to fear that this mix-up will last for a very long time. And it is all because he [Levi Matvei/Matthew Levi] writes down what I say incorrectly.”{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|p=16}} Yeshua goes on to say that, “[Matthew] walks and walks alone with a goatskin parchment and writes unceasingly. But once I took a look at this parchment and was aghast. Absolutely nothing that was written down there did I ever say. I begged him, ‘For God’s sake burn your parchment!’ But he tore it out of my hands and ran away.”{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|p=16}}

Mailer’s Son is just as skeptical about what his “scribes,” as he calls them, and in particular Matthew, are writing down about his sayings. He says that “They had me saying all manner of things, and some were the opposite of others. Matthew put so many sayings together; indeed, that he might as well have had me not ceasing to speak for a day and a night, and speaking out of two mouths that did not listen to each other.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=111}}.  

Bulgakov’s Matthew is also, as new converts often are, a literal believer, a kind of pre-fundamentalist. At the execution of Yeshua, Matthew demands that God send a miracle to put Yeshua out of his misery after more than four hours on his post. When the miracle does not come, Mathew curses God, calls him deaf and says, “You are a god of evil.”{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|p=149}} However, when a thunderstorm arrives soon after, Levi regrets that he was too hasty with his curses and now believes that God will no longer listen to him.

Let me now return to Yeshua and Pilate, for their interactions are crucial to ''The Master and Margarita'' and are also very important to ''Gospel''. Pilate figures importantly in both works, as one would expect, and he is also portrayed as highly intelligent by both authors. In Bulgakov’s ''Master and Margarita'', Yeshua is a philosopher who Pilate has whipped for constantly referring to him, not by his title, Hegemon, but as “good man.” Yeshua does this because it is his habit to call everyone, including the brutal Roman centurion with the nickname of Mark the Rat Killer—he is the one who gives him a mild whipping—a “good man.” Pilate refers to Yeshua alternately as a vagrant philosopher, a holy fool who is insane, deranged, or mentally ill.

In Mailer’s ''Gospel'', Pilate also appears in the role of philosopher, when he says, “What is truth? Where there is truth, there will be no peace. Where peace abides, you will find no truth.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=219}} And at the very end of ''Gospel'', Yeshua recalls these words of Pilate and concludes that since “in peace there was no truth, and in truth, no peace. For that reason I do not bring peace but a sword. I would wage war on all that makes less that we ought to be, less generous.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=241}} Mailer’s use of Pilate as a motivator of Yeshua’s own philosophy is as far as I know an innovation in his retelling of the story of Yeshua and Pilate. Furthermore, Yeshua’s employment of Pilate as a source of wisdom would probably appear to be blasphemous to some. For Mailer, however, the notion that good and evil, as well as their exponents, may be intertwined in an intricate nexus that is difficult or impossible for us to untangle, is virtually an article of faith, one that appears early in ''Gospel'', when Yeshua wonders whether the Devil may also be capable of good deeds.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=15}}

One of the most problematic and controversial aspects of Bulgakov’s ''Master'' is his depiction of Pilate’s guilt for his part in the crucifixion of Yeshua and his eventual release from that guilt. This question is a vexed one for a number of reasons. Despite his considerable temporal power, Pilate’s options in this matter of executing Yeshua were greatly proscribed by local politics and custom. We know that his initial ruling—forgive my own synthetic paraphrase—“I see no guilt in this man” eventually yielded—here again my own synoptic version—to a combination of pressures from the Sanhedrin and/or local popular opinion. One of Bulgakov’s innovations in his version of the story is, as just noted, to portray Pilate as having suffered great pangs of guilt over nearly two millennia for having lacked the courage to stop the execution of an obviously innocent man. What is more, during all of this time Bulgakov’s Pilate wanted to talk again with that eccentric philosopher to whose execution he had acceded.

The most controversial part of Bulgakov’s story of Yeshua and Pilate takes place near the end of the novel, when Pilate is freed from his centuries’ long torment and allowed to have his long desired conversation with Yeshua in the light of the moon. Virtually all critics view this passage to mean that Pilate is ultimately rewarded with light, although I would point out that moonlight is far more ambiguous than its daytime counterpart. In any case, the notion that Pilate should receive any release or reward at all is problematic because, as Gary Rosenshield writes, “Pilate himself recognizes that he deserves his reputation as a terrible monster among the Jews”{{sfn|Rosenshield|1997|p=198}}—whatever guilt he may have experienced for however long.

Although I find Bulgakov’s attribution of a guilty conscience to Pilate an original twist on the story of Yeshua and Pilate, I doubt that it comports with the historical Pilate. In this regard I find that Norman Mailer’s version of the story more persuasive, for Mailer depicts Pilate as a corrupt bribe taker who makes a deal with the Sanhedrin to allow Yeshua’s execution for considerable personal gain. When one takes into account what we know about how business was done in the Roman Empire, Mailer’s insight seems more than plausible.

One of the more intriguing characters on the Jerusalem scene in the time of Yeshua was his erstwhile friend Judas/Yehudah. Bulgakov, who is perhaps most inventive in his portrayals of Pilate and Woland, leaves us with

a fairly standard portrait of Yehudah, although he does give the tale a couple of twists. The first of these is that a young woman named Niza is described as betraying Yehudah, who has come down to us as the archetypical betrayer. Also, Yehudah is executed by order of Pilate, who tells the head of the secret police, Aphranius, that he has a premonition that Yehudah will be executed (stabbed to death) the night of their meeting, and that the deed will be carried out by one of Yeshua’s followers; the money he was to be

paid will be returned to Caiaphus. When Aphranius wonders that all this can be accomplished in the short time of one night, Pilate insists that it can and that his intuition, which has never been wrong, tells him Yehudah will be executed.{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=262–263}} Thus does Pilate, in the best mafia or KGB style, insure

that Yehudah will pay the ultimate penalty for what Pilate calls his “monstrous betrayal.”{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|p=262}}

In ''Gospel'', Judas receives an entirely different treatment. Here Yeshua is wholly sympathetic with Judas, because he loved him and also because his suffering would be greater even than his own. In Mailer’s version of the story, Yeshua says,“No matter that Judas had betrayed me; he had also warned me.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=214}} Furthermore, Yeshua believes that Judas was the one among his disciples who knew most about the deals between Pilate and the local priests, especially Caiaphas, who together with Pilate kept order in Jerusalem. Part

of this arrangement included Pilate receiving gold from the Temple in secret. Yeshua says that Judas was not happy about these deals and that he was dissatisfied with him (Yeshua), because he (Judas) wanted to revolt against Roman rule. Finally, in ''Gospel’s'' version of the story, Judas gave back the silver coins and hanged himself.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=217}}

Leaving Pilate aside at least for the moment, let us turn again to our hero, Yeshua. And when we think of Yeshua, we cannot but help thinking of miracles. The question of how both authors treat miracles is particularly tricky, if only because modern readers may or may not be amenable to believing in such miracles. Moreover, both authors stress the human aspects of Yeshua over the divine, or ostensibly divine ones. For the most part, Mailer’s Yeshua downplays the more exaggerated versions of his miraculous performances, as for example when he gives a detailed explanation of how he fed the people in the wilderness by cutting up the bread and fish into small pieces. He says that “this story was much exaggerated by Mark and Matthew and Luke. No angel appeared in the sky, nor did the manna that God gave to Moses appear.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=116}} From a strictly realistic point of view, there is another rather large miracle hidden here—actually it is in plain sight. And that is that Yeshua, in his post-mortal guise of course, has the privilege most historical

But there are numerous miracles in ''Gospel'' that, unlike the story about the bread and the fish, are not rationalized. Many of these have to do with Yeshua’s power to heal the sick and, most dramatically, in the case of Lazarus, raising the dead. In this instance, Yeshua declares, “I had the power to raise a man who had begun to rot.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=144}} Here I would like to note briefly that {{harvtxt|Tolstoy|1904}} would have scorned both Bulgakov’s and Mailer’s portrayals of Yeshua, for in his ''The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated'' (published first in 1902 in Russian and in English translation in 1904) he rigorously rejects any intimations of the miraculous in all of the gospel stories, including the accounts of the birth of Christ, the business with the bread and fish in the wilderness, and the “raising” of Lazarus.

In Mailer’s ''Gospel'', Yeshua is uneasy with his ability to perform miracles; he is sometimes puzzled, even abashed at his talent. At one point, in speaking with a wise elder about his power to work miracles, Yeshua wonders whether the Devil also might not be able to use his power to do good.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=15}} This thought forms an interesting intersection with Bulgakov’s ''Master and Margarita'', where the notion of the devil performing good deeds is given an explicitly Faustian character. In fact, the epigraph to the novel is from Goethe’s ''Faust'', and here is how it reads: “I am part of that power that forever wills evil and forever works good.” This notion is not developed in ''Gospel'', however, where Mailer is more concerned with Yeshua’s battle with the Devil, who he believes is constantly trying to outsmart him. Mailer’s portrayal of

Yeshua struggling to understand who he is and what his role in life should be gives ''Gospel'' the decided flavor of a Bildungsroman, whereas in Bulgakov’s ''Master'' we encounter Yeshua only in his last days.

Bulgakov, who in other places in ''Master'' and elsewhere often deals in the fantastic and the supernatural, is much more measured in his treatment of Yeshua and the miraculous. There is one place, though, where Yeshua demonstrates powers that appear to be, if not strictly divine, well beyond the capability of most mere mortals. This takes place in his interview with Pilate, when he figures out that Pilate is suffering from a migraine headache. Yeshua says to Pilate, “your head aches, and it aches so badly that you’re thinking faintheartedly about death .... But your torments will soon end, and your headache will pass.”{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|p=17}} Shortly thereafter he tells him that his headache is over and that he should go for a walk in the gardens on Mount Eleon.{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|p=18}} As we see here, Bulgakov’s Yeshua also has the power to heal, just as does Mailer’s. But Bulgakov’s Yeshua is also greatly concerned with his own situation, which he sees as increasingly tenuous. This is shown graphically when he asks Pilate, “Couldn’t you let me go, Hegemon?” asked the prisoner suddenly, and his voice became anxious. “I can see that they want to kill me.”{{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|p=23}}

Because Norman Mailer (re)tells the story of Yeshua in the time of Yeshua and from the point of view of Yeshua—and, by the way, this narrative device in itself is, as far as I am aware, an original gambit on his part that gives his version of the story a special character—he does not have the liberty Bulgakov takes to embody the Devil in a Mephistophelian guise and must deal with the Devil directly. Whereas Bulgakov’s Devil in the form of Woland tests Muscovites of the 1930s with various temptations, especially money, the testing and contesting in Mailer’s ''Gospel'' is between Yeshua and the Devil, head on, so to speak. One might even say that Mailer sees the battle between Good and Evil and the battle between God and the Devil not in Goethian-Faustian terms but in old-fashioned biblical terms. Moreover, Mailer conceives of modern history as a battle between God and the Devil, as he makes clear in ''The Castle in the Forest''.

At the end of ''Gospel'', Mailer, by way of the words of the Son, gives a laconic, and I would claim powerful, sweeping summary of history since the time of Yeshua that begins with a reference to the original rift between Christians and Jews over exactly who he was and moves forward to virtually the present day. Using the Son as his mouthpiece, Mailer also remarks on how rich and pious are many Christians, “who are often greater in their hypocrisy than those who condemned me.” Yeshua is also critical of the ostentation of St. Peter’s in Rome, where there is more gold than anywhere in the world.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=239}}

Yeshua says at the end of ''Gospel'' that he comes with a sword, but this is no conventional battle sword, but rather the Son’s sword is designed to “wage war on all that makes us less than we ought to be, less generous.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=219}} Mailer’s Son then concludes that it is not love “that will take us to our good end, but is instead the reward we receive at the end of the hard road that is our life and the days of our life.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=242}} Whatever version of the story we may or may not subscribe to, I think we can safely conclude here that this is Mailer’s version, this is his benediction on the story of Yeshua.

I asked earlier whether our authors are desacralizing or resacralizing the “sacred text(s).” At the end of ''Gospel'' I would have to conclude that Mailer is resacralizing the text/story, but he is renarrating it in order to set a few things straight about the meaning of good and evil, peace and truth, and love and life.

===How Anna and Ivan Got Into the Castle{{efn|I read a paper on this subject called “The Coronation Digression—or is it?—in ''The Castle in the Forest''” at the Norman Mailer Society’s Conference in October 2008.}}===

I have some questions about Chapter VIII,“The Coronation of Nicholas II,” in Mailer’s ''Castle'': is it just an entertaining digression that adds a little royal Russian spice to an otherwise plebian set of characters, or is it an integral,

weaknesses.” More specifically, he had learned “that God would not be equipped to punish” [Hitler] for activating the gas chambers in the concentration camps.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} Shifting gears again, narrator Dieter says, “If there are

readers who still will say, ‘I would rather go on with what is happening in Hafeld,’ I have a reply. ‘That is your right,’ ... just turn to page 261. Adolf Hitler’s story will pick up again right there.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=213–214}} In other words, I dare you to skip the scintillating story I am about treat you with.

knowledge whatsoever about others. There are also many instances of ''praeteritio'', in which Dieter says that he will not, for example, describe the feast Nicky and Alix (Nicholas and Alexandra) partook of at their coronation and then proceeds not only to describe the menu in detail but also the complexities of the social relations involved.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=237–238}} I would even say that Mailer absolutely revels in his use of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelistic narrative techniques, as is evident in Dieter’s frequent motivation of his

Maestro and the Dummkopf, in as thorough and graphic a manner as anywhere else in his fiction. In ''Castle'', as elsewhere, it appears that the Dummkopf, for all of his good will and noble efforts, is losing to the Maestro, who seems able to outsmart, outwit, and out-trick his erstwhile rival. I say erstwhile, because in the Coronation Chapter, and even more so in the epilogue

to ''Castle'', Mailer suggests that the Dummkopf and the Maestro may actually be part of the same team, rather than the rivals they are usually understood to be.

historical in nature, and two of which, ''Anna Karenina'' and “The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Tolstoy, are of course fictional. Mailer is obviously and greatly

works in the bibliography to ''Castle'', not counting the others in which he is treated as well.  Excerpts from the correspondence between Nicky and Alix are one of Dieter’s principal sources of information about their respective personalities and their relationship with each other. Throughout this chapter and throughout ''Castle'', Mailer is using historical exactitude in the service of fictional verisimilitude.

Dieter’s characterization of Russian peasants. As often happens with Dieter this description is ambivalent and self-contradictory in the extreme. Claiming that he respects Russian peasants, Dieter says they look old before their time, but are nonetheless as strong as draft animals and have the patience of

at least had Tolstoy and Dostoeyevsky harangued their readers.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=240}} Finally,

as he puts it, “our job is to reduce human possibilities.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=240}} Almost no discussion of Russian peasants is complete without some reference to Tolstoy, but the addition of Dostoevsky here is somewhat puzzling. Is it a false lead, which was a frequent tactic of Dostoevsky himself, or is Dieter perhaps just showing off his erudition? It is not that Dostoevsky was without sympathy for peasants, it is just that this is a topic about which one might say Tolstoy

back to Pushkin’s ''Eugene Onegin'' in that it combines several genres under the cover of one book. These include the family chronicle, a novel of psychological realism, elements of an historical novel, a novel of history itself (based on the burning questions of the day), a philosophical novel, and even a Romance, if only in parodic form. My claim is that all of these genres and all of these features are also prominent in ''Castle''. It is my contention that the reason, or at least one of the main reasons, that Mailer is so attracted to Anna and Ivan, and by Tolstoy’s works in the overall, is that in them Tolstoy addresses the great moral and philosophical questions directly, earnestly, and often with a didactic edge—just what Mailer does in his own novels.

It remains to be decided whether the Coronation Chapter is just a digression, and whether it is or it is not, why Mailer spends so much time on the Coronation of Nicholas II, alias Nicky. In the first part of the Coronation Chapter, Dieter goes to great lengths to set out the folly of the Dummkopf’s having staked so much on Russia and on Nicky and Alix. Russia herself is a particularly problematic project, because, as Dieter puts it, “this was an amazing decision. To depend on Russia—so invested with corruption. So

inspire hatred, envy, and the loss of love.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=215}} Dieter says that one of the main benefits of his participation in the Coronation of Nicholas II is that he

“learned how to manipulate the will of the people.” He also “learned a good deal about God’s strengths and His increasing weaknesses,” including especially His inability to prevent the catastrophe of the gas chambers used in the holocaust.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=213}} Indeed, throughout the Coronation Chapter, Dieter is repeating and sometimes recasting the fear that Rojack and Cherry express in ''Dream'' that God may be losing the battle with the Devil. Dieter is of course not afraid but rather excited by this prospect. And he is puzzled as to why God would invest so much in Tsar Nicholas and his bride Alix. Dieter ventures that “The DK was no longer in full possession of His Faculties. Could that be true or was it false?”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=218}}   

He then proceeds to test this proposition. The fact that he experiences “uneasiness” when he sees the beauty of nature, such as “a fine field, a rocky crag, peerless sunset . . . the bedazzlements of grass when the dew is on the ground”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=218}} would seem to indicate that the DK has not lost all of his creative powers. Dieter therefore rationalizes that all of this was created long

ago, but now “His force might be slackening” and the proof of that is that “humankind had become His least successful Creation?”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=218}} And thus “were we now awash in the dithering of an old divinity. This Nicky and Alix—they seemed so naïve, so unfitted for any vast project.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=218}}. Certainly the lovey-dovey stuff of the diaries of Nicky and Alix could only convince the cynical Dieter of their ''naïvete'' and their lack of fitness to rule a country as unruly as Russia.  

people should not be “carried away by senseless dreams of taking part in the business of government .... Let everyone know that I will retain the principles of autocracy as firmly and unbendingly as my unforgettable late father.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=223}} Dieter also shows well in a number of places that the indecisive and sentimental Nicky is utterly unlike his late father, Alexander III, and that he is only too aware of his deficiencies that comparison with his father illuminates.

Mailer’s portrait of Nicholas II comports well with the historical and fictional sources with which I am familiar. In ''Doctor Zhivago'', for example, Boris Pasternak describes Nicholas as unpretentious, even timid, shy, and irresolute, and thus dependent on the guidance of Grand Duke Mikhail, when he is about to address his troops. Nicholas is unable to utter grandiloquent words about my people this and my people that, because to do so would have been both out of character and un-Russian. But Pasternak’s narrator wonders that a man so apparently mild mannered could also be an executioner.{{sfn|Pasternak|1997|p=120}} In ''Castle'', there are hints of a darker, more brutal side to Nicky’s character, but there is nothing quite as direct as this. In ''Castle'', Nicholas gets angry with his people, especially in connection with the events at ''Khodynskoe pole'', but even then he also blames the lack of security and even himself for the calamity—what he calls the sin—that took place there. In ''Castle', rather, the sense of impending doom both Nicky and Alix experience is developed throughout the Coronation Chapter. This, too, comports well with the histories of this ill-fated couple as I know them.

The disaster of Khodynka is the central event of the Coronation Chapter and it is suffused with the spirit of Tolstoy. This is the Peasant Festival, an event that was staged for the people, one intended to entertain and reward them for their loyalty to the crown. Dieter is proud to inform us that his plan

thousand people perished in the crush that ensued there after the crowd stormed the stalls with the beer and the goods that were intended for them. For his part, Mailer indicates that ''Khodynskoe pole'', that is Khodynsky Field, was a principal site in the battle between the Dummkopf and the Maestro,

morgue, where many of the dead celebrants have been taken, when two corpses “rise up from a comatose state in unison and even cried out in unison.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=248}} Shortly after, we witness two more returns from apparent death. In the first, when a man regains consciousness, his wife is ecstatic and cries out twice, “God is here!” In the second, when the family patriarch opens his eyes, his wife cries out, “the devil sent you back, you monster!”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=249}}

subtext that runs throughout the Coronation Chapter. An example from Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories illustrates Tolstoy’s method well. In “Sevastopol in May,” 1855, a shell falls near Praskukhin and Mikhailov and the former thinks, “Thank God, I’m only contused.”{{sfn|Tolstoy|2006|p=242}}. It turns out that “he had been killed on the spot by a shell splinter that had struck him in the middle of the chest.”{{sfn|Tolstoy|2006|p=243}}. Meanwhile, when the shell explodes, Mikhailov thinks to himself, “It’s all over!” What happened, however, is that “he had received a slight head wound from a flying stone.”{{sfn|Tolstoy|2006|p=244}}. If there is a difference between Mailer’s and Tolstoy’s approaches, I believe that we may conclude that Mailer’s is the more humorous of the two. Nevertheless, Mailer’s juxtaposition of the wife who cries out to God in thanks with the wife who curses the Devil in anger is also very like Tolstoy in that he wants to make doubly sure, absolutely sure, that we his readers get the point he is making—which is that God and the Devil had an equal part in the catastrophe of Khodynka.

The Coronation Chapter shows, however, that this is not simply a one-on-one battle, as it is often thought, since as Dieter says, “there is a labyrinth of relations, after all, between the Maestro and the Dummkopf. I could list an endless register of the compromises, brutalities, games, and deceits on both sides.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=233–234}}. With specific reference to the ceremony, Dieter says,

gifts.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=234}}. Does he mean that the Maestro, too, was responsible for some of